Reply from Haym Soloveitchik to the JQR Interview with Robert Brody

By Haym Soloveitchik

Editor’s Note: As a recap of a recent exchange between two scholars on a nuanced debate within medieval Jewish history (see the first footnote), we present this final note by Professor Haym Soloveitchik.

Part One

Dr. Robert Brody advances no new arguments against my thesis in his recent interview at the blog of the Jewish Quarterly Review (https://katz.sas.upenn.edu/blog/jewish-quarterly-review/jqr-contributor-conversation-robert-brody-origins-talmud-study). I have addressed all his points in my original essay and my reply in the Jewish Quarterly Review and online on my personal website.[1] The reader can judge for himself or herself whether my arguments are persuasive.

Basically, the issue between us boils down to two points. Brody does not believe in historical implication. Two facts, to him, imply nothing. If so, all the scholar can ever have is a large pile of inert facts. For example, he denies the notion that Sura and Pumpeditha would never have surrendered their monopoly on the “Vox Talmudica,” for that “would have been institutional suicide.”[2] If that’s the case, all we can know of the past is what is explicitly stated in the sources of the past. Brody equally does not believe in probabilities (not even cumulative probabilities [3]). In the absence of probability (or improbability), all theories are equal. If one can believe that scores of scribes both educated and ignorant, with good or bad memories can inscribe a text of a million and a half words without any change in that text’s meaning,[4] then one can believe almost anything. If so, no inference is better than another. The result is that it isn’t worth pondering the implications of the data of the past; one should concentrate on simply knowing them.

This is my last reply to Dr. Brody’s critiques. I believe the exchange has reached the point of diminishing returns.

Part Two

Dr. Brody has just published in the Bar-Ilan Internet Journal a critique of my remarks of Rashi’s emendations (haggahot) on the Talmud, online here (https://jewish-faculty.biu.ac.il/files/jewish-faculty/shared/JSIJ16/brody.pdf). As this point is irrelevant to my argument, I forgo answering it now. Allow me to explain.

The crucial point in my argument is that there existed ongoing contact between Bavel and the Rhineland in the ninth and tenth centuries. This would have enabled the leaders (he-{h.}ashuvim) of the Rhineland to make inquiries of the state of talmud torah in Bavel, the economic situation of the yeshivot and the level of scholarship in the various institutions in Bavel. Conversely, it would have enabled the men of the Third Yeshivah to make inquiries of the nature of the Jewish settlement in the Rhineland, the seriousness of any offer and the financial abilities of the Rhineland leaders to support such a migration and the enterprise upon which it would embark. This ongoing contact would also have enabled manuscripts from Bavel to reach Ashkenaz in those centuries. Such a continuance of contact is proven by the trade and communication routes of the time. With goods brought regularly from the Near and Far East came manuscripts of sifrei kodesh. Jews in the Rhineland would pay handsomely for manuscripts, just as the Christian prelates and monasteries paid for reliquia. There is no reason not to conclude that manuscripts of the widest variety were available the Rhineland the great emporium of Western Europe in the closing centuries of the first millennium. Whether or not Rashi took a copy of some of these manuscripts back to Troyes is irrelevant to my contention. I introduced this issue simply because Noam’s article treated both the diffusion of such manuscripts in Early Ashkenaz and the nature of Rashi’s haggahot on the tractate of Sukkah. I believe Noam to be correct about Sukkah, but this is simply frosting on my cake. Rashi’s haggahot are at least a century after the migration of the Third Yeshivah, and their nature is of no matter to my argument.

I have long pondered the nature of these emendations well before the idea of any Third Yeshivah occurred to me, and should I come to some conclusion, I will include it in the fourth volume of my collected essays. As of now, I have spent enough time replying to Dr. Brody and must return to my own research.

Footnotes:

[1] Haym Soloveitchik, Collected Essays, vol. 2 (Oxford: Littman Library, 2014), 150-201; Haym Soloveitchik, “On the Third Yeshivah of Bavel: A Response to Robert Brody,” Jewish Quarterly Review 109:2 (Spring 2019): 289-320; Haym Soloveitchik, “Reply to Brody–Part II,” at HaymSoloveitchik.org, available here (https://haymsoloveitchik.org/downloads/Reply%20to%20Brody%20II.pdf). The only new point that he adds here is the documentation of his statement of the difference between significant and trivial variants. However, I never challenged this principal; I simply argued that there are also other principles in textual criticism, and the mark of a good editor is his or her ability to use the one most appropriate for the case at hand. See “Reply to Brody—Part II,” pp. 39-40.

[2] Collected Essays, pp. 171-172; “Reply to Brody–Part II,” pp. 9, 20.

[3] “Reply to Brody—Part II,” pp. 38-41.

[4] Ibid. pp. 21-22.